4 Beam Dynamics, Extreme Beams, Sources and Beam Related Technology
4C Plasma and Laser Wakefield Acceleration
Paper Title Page
TU1A02
 Reaching Beyond Conventional Accelerator Capabilities with Laser-Plasma Ion Accelerators  
 
  • I. Pomerantz
    Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel
  
  For the past few decades, nuclear research has been exclusive to large accelerator and reactor facilities. The availability of tabletop particle sources based on high intensity lasers opens venues for new research methods in nuclear physics, both at large facilities and at university-scale laboratories. It has been demonstrated in many experiments that the kinetic energy of a particle radiated by a high intensity laser-plasma interaction is sufficient to induce nuclear reactions. These achievements, however, duplicated experimental results achieved decades ago with conventional accelerator. While often smaller and cheaper, laser systems to-date have shown no technical advantage over conventional accelerators. This talk will review the state-of-the-art in laser-ion acceleration, and discuss how next generation laser systems can go beyond conventional accelerator capabilities. Specifically, the talk will present a novel, ultrashort pulsed laser-driven neutron generator developed at U. Texas (I. Pomerantz et al., Ultrashort pulsed neutron source, Phys. Rev. Lett 2014, 113:184801), generating a peak flux of 1018 n/cm2/s, thus exceeding any other pulsed or CW neutron source.  
slides icon Slides TU1A02 [21.894 MB]  
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FR1A06
 Staging of Laser-Plasma Electron Accelerators  
 
  • S. Steinke
    LBNL, Berkeley, California, USA
  
  Funding: DOE-HEP and DOE-NNSA DNN R&D
We present results of an experiment where two Laser-Plasma-Accelerator stages are coupled at a short distance, as is needed to increase energy while preserving average gradient. Stable electron beams produced by the first stage were focused by a discharge capillary-based active plasma lens, through a plasma mirror which coupled a second independent laser, into the second stage. The electron beam interacted with a dark-current-free, quasi-linear wakefield excited by the second stage laser. Changing the arrival time of the electron beam allowed localized reconstruction of the temporal field structure excited by the wake and determination of the on-axis plasma density. Staged acceleration in the wakefield of the second stage was verified by a momentum gain of the electron beam. The results indicate that limits to plasma accelerator energy gain can be overcome using staged acceleration, which provides a path to collider-relevant energies. Such compact staging is also important to photon sources where it can be used to decelerate electrons after photon production to mitigate shielding needs. 		 
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